Does our teaching keep up with our preaching about equity? Some of the teachers most vocally outspoken about social inequities, says Henry Seton, end up reproducing these inequities in their own classrooms. Seton shares two critical steps for ensuring this doesn't happen.

Teachers are frequently told to use "research-based strategies." At the same time, they face unreasonable workloads, with inadequate time and resources to engage with the research and evaluate it themselves. In the same professional development workshops that elevate the importance of research, teachers are also told to focus on…

"There are no shortcuts for true equity," says authors and consultants Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan. Equity work is hard, on-going work--and it means not falling into ineffective traps and tropes. Find out what these traps are and how to avoid them.

Traditional PD sessions share information on new practices, but teachers often can't translate that information effectively to implement the new practice in their classrooms. A better way is to show a teacher a model of excellent practice by a colleague and help her reflect on the "gap" between her practice and the model, then plan…

Charter schools--what was their original promise? They would enroll diverse groups of students. They would give teachers the room and power to innovate. They would be educational laboratories that would find new ways to reach students, and they would share those lessons with other public schools. But charter schools haven't lived up to their…

Few school leaders are experiencing a shortage of data. Most are actually drowning in data, with a wealth of test scores, student demographic information, and an increasing load of "formative" assessment data that may or may not be worthy of the name (Popham, 2008). The challenge is facing both an overabundance of data and a scarcity of…

Young teacher applicants to the Teach Plus Policy Fellows Program indicate that contrary to the opinions of those who believe they are in teaching only for the short term, they actually want to find a way to continue teaching. Their description of the profession they seek--one that makes a difference, challenges them, engages them as leaders, and…

Schools have recently begun to place increased emphasis on the use of rigorous research evidence in guiding instructional decisions. Turning education into an evidence-based field is easier to advocate than to achieve, particularly in an environment of competing claims about what works. In this article, the author discusses the factors which…

Today, researchers can learn about blood flow, electromagnetic fields, and chemical composition of the brain by using functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). As biologists, medical researchers, and cognitive scientists learn more about brain functions, educators must keep informed, study, and apply what they have learned in the classroom.…

Many teachers are creating learning environments where students' uses of reading and writing are inseparable and relevant to their daily lives. These teachers are supported by recent trends in language arts research, professionalizing trends in today's political climate, education programs modeling language unification, and enlightened educational…

Applying Deming's principles to education represents change in metaphor, not paradigm shift. Exchanging factory metaphor for enlightened corporation metaphor updates business/economics image but perpetuates view of students as raw materials to be processed efficiently. No business metaphor truly aims at improving society as a whole. If production…

An ethnography is a richly textured description of community life that allows us to understand others on their own terms. The ethnographic work of Heath, MacLeod, Taylor, and others can help teachers uncover their buried assumptions and see faces instead of abstractions and statistics. This article summarizes six ethnographic works revealing…

Since 1990, when a Fort Meyers (Florida) school became the nation's first core-knowledge site, over 50 other schools have taken pioneering steps to teach this curriculum. Core-knowledge guidelines include school-community understanding, acceptance, and involvement; alignment of curriculum with local and state guidelines; and collaboration and…

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development concentrates on three questions: how children learn to read English and other languages; which skill deficits and environmental factors impede reading development; and which instructional approaches work best with particular children. Research indicates that deficits in developing…

An instructional media professor discovered that using his hands and asking students to imitate his words and movements communicates (via varied learning styles) certain ideas about the brain. Learning is enhanced by a nonthreatening environment, guiding procedures, appropriate facility design, cooperative learning, and multiple ways of knowing.…